Inescapable Escapism

I watched as Dina started to move towards her side of the room, my torch flicking back and forth as I checked to make sure nothing was going to jump out at her. It didn’t seem as if anything was going to. I couldn’t see any monsters or creatures, but the corpses still concerned me. They weren’t moving, but… it felt like a matter of time.

It was too quiet. The creatures outside had fallen silent, and I wasn’t sure if they’d gotten bored and left or if they were still there, and we just couldn’t hear them through the door. It was really thick, so that would have made sense, but the thought of those monsters standing outside and waiting for us made me shudder.

I took a step away from the door, wanting to put more space between myself and the monsters, and looked around the room again. It appeared strangely untouched. A thin blanket of dust had settled on every surface, but apart from the corpse, there was no rubble or decay on the almost perfectly preserved carpet.

The items on the table lining the far wall hadn’t fared quite as well, I realised as I drew closer and eyed one of the objects. Originally, it was probably some kind of metal ornament. Just decorative. It was hard to tell, though. Only the large rectangular frame remained. The rest appeared to have rusted away, leaving nothing more than a pile of orange dust.

I leant closer, instinctively narrowing my eyes before sighing. We hadn’t picked up any ocular buffs yet, and I’d gotten too used to them. I just assumed that I’d be able to squint and zoom in. That was the usual one we found in the early levels, but I wasn’t sure if it even would have helped. I still wished I had the buff, though.

Tearing my eyes away from the rubble, I glanced back at Dina before scanning the rest of the table. It stretched the length of the entire wall, and there was another one on the side that Dina was searching. It seemed excessive. Who needed that much space to display things? In all of the offices I had been in, the only decoration was on their desk, but whoever owned the room we were standing in had so much stuff.

Part of me wished I’d been able to see it back in the day, before it became nothing more than ruins. It would have been so cool to be able to walk along the table and examine all of the strange and cool objects that seemed to have no purpose. We didn’t really do things like that in our city. Stuff had to have a purpose; otherwise, it was just a waste of resources, and that was frowned upon.

It was more than frowned upon. It wasn’t allowed, but that didn’t seem to be a problem for whoever owned the office. That made sense, though. The game was meant to be set on the surface. They always made things they didn’t need and used resources freely, even when they knew they were running out. It was one of the many things that led to their inevitable downfall.

I stepped forward slightly, glancing towards the corpse on the floor before looking back at the table. Not everything there was completely useless. A few items glittered in the distance, but right next to me, there was a heal pack. I picked up the breakable glass, barely even glancing at the syringe inside before shoving it into my pocket. A small notification appeared at the bottom of my vision, informing me of what I’d just stored, but it was quickly replaced by another alert.

Scanning the room again, I hesitated before pulling up my inventory and switching to view Dina’s pockets. She’d picked up a lot more than I had. Somehow, she’d managed to get over her initial fear of the bodies and was moving along her side of the room at a good pace. That realisation should have made me hurry to catch up, but something caught my eye.

She hadn’t gathered anything too unusual; it was just the normal selection of creature info cards, heal packs and weapons, but something pulled at me, prompting me to pull up the cards. I flicked through them, searching for the monsters that we’d seen outside. The cards always told us useful information about new monsters, like what kind of weapon they were weak against, but there was nothing there that even slightly resembled the beasts.

Hesitation washed over me, and I started to flick through the cards again, paying more attention to what I was seeing. Something was different. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was exactly, but something had changed. The images just looked ever so slightly… more real. Normally, they were just randomly generated pictures of the creatures, clearly taken from in the game, but they were different. The backgrounds looked more… realistic.

I stared at the spider-like monster for a moment before cocking my head to the side. In every card I’d seen before, it was pictured on a web in the corner of a room. I wasn’t sure why, but it always was. That was what I expected, but the card Dina had picked up showed it dangling from a thin thread, seemingly illuminated by torchlight.

They never changed the lighting.

I continued searching through the cards until I found another creature whose card I knew well. Or I used to. The wolf thing was different, and it wasn’t just the background that time. The monster itself had a different design. It wasn’t as big as the normal creature, that only showed up on level fifteen or higher. It was leaner and had no horns, making it closer to how real wolves looked in all the pictures I’d seen in school.

But the background was different too. I’d been too distracted by the monster at first to notice, but it wasn’t surrounded by just a sea of snow. There was something back there. A ruined city. Crumbling buildings could just about be seen in the distance, but there was no snow. There didn’t seem to be any ice either.

“What’s wrong?” Dina asked, making me jump.

I blinked the inventory away, pressing one hand against my racing heart as I tried to shove the sensation of wrongness away again.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just having a look at the monster cards. Have you seen them yet?”

Dina turned towards me, a confused expression on her face.

“No? Why? Is there a new one?” she asked before gasping. “Wait! Did we complete the collection? I didn’t get an achievement.”

“No, no, sorry,” I apologised quickly. “I think there must have been an update or something. The cards are all different.”

“Oh, really?” Dina said, a blue glow appearing in her eye.

“Yeah. Check out the wolf,” I said. “I swear it looks completely different, but I might just be losing my mind.”

Dina didn’t reply, and I forced myself to look back at the table, grabbing the nearest collectable item to distract myself. A dart gun, I realised. Almost entirely useless. It could only take down tiny monsters, and even then, it was a struggle. It was basically worthless, but I shoved it into my pocket nonetheless. I could sell it if I had to. It went for… not much.

“Huh, you’re right,” Dina replied slowly. “It… kind of looks like an old-timey photograph, right?”

“Yeah, it does,” I agreed.

The blue glow disappeared from her eye, and she grinned at me.

“I wonder what else they’ve changed in the update.”

“Me too,” I muttered with significantly less enthusiasm before spotting a small metal rectangle and darting towards it. “I found a buff!”

Dina had been turning back towards her side of the room, but at that, she spun around again.

“You did? Which one?” Dina asked excitedly. “The notif just said ‘vision’, which could be… loads of them.”

I lifted the device higher, scrutinising it closely. There was no label or any kind of markings on it to explain what it did, but I dropped it into my pocket before pulling up my inventory. The names of the buffs were usually so explanatory, but the one I’d just found wasn’t.

“It’s just called ‘Vision, mark four’,” I read out. “And the description says… ‘Identify objects with just a glance. No more fumbling around for the right piece of equipment, trademarked SI’…”

“So… it just tells you what you’re looking at?” Dina asked. “Mmmm, that could be kind of useful. It would make searching here easier.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I agreed. “We’d know if it was worth picking something up before we do… Should I equip it?”

“Why not? I mean, if it’s bad, we can always just unequip.”

“We can…” I replied.

She had a good point, but equipping a weird buff that we’d never even seen before felt like a bad idea. But then, we’d never had any issues with buffs before in the game, so it seemed unlikely that it would start now, even with the new update. It would probably be fine.

I sucked in a deep breath before glancing at the glowing button in my vision. My inventory disappeared, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then, the world around me rippled. Panic spiked within me, and I blinked, looking around as I tried to work out what was going on. Every single item in the room seemed to sharpen and then blur at a dizzying speed, and I closed my eyes as nausea threatened me.

But that didn’t even help. Static buzzed behind my eyelids, and I opened my eyes again, pulling up my inventory. I had to clamp my lips together as I navigated the menu, somehow managing to find the equipped items. My gaze hovered over the unassuming buff, preparing to unequip it, but there was no need. Behind the glowing screen, my vision had returned to normal.

A shaky breath escaped my lips as I looked around the room, seeing labels pop up from every item my gaze focused on. At first, it was just the collectables, but then everything else began to appear until only the two corpses were unlabelled.

“This is so cool,” Dina whispered, looking around the room with wide eyes. “What? Oh.”

I stared at her, seeing her look of shock.

“Do I…?” I started before trailing off.

“Have a glowing ring around your iris?” she finished for me. “I assume I do too?”

“You do.”

There was a pause before Dina grinned.

“Is it wrong that I think they look kind of cool?” she asked.

I laughed as some of the tension slipped out of me.

“Don’t tell your mom, but I do too.”

“I would never,” Dina replied, sounding offended that I would even say that. “You know Mom’s been working on those contact alternatives for so long, and I’ve told her so many times that having a blue square across your eye when you use the system is so much better than… well, this exact thing.”

Dina giggled.

“Yeah… I kind of love it.”

“She can never know,” Dina said solemnly. “She was bad enough when Geo told her he’d prefer it. If I say the same…”

She shuddered.

“That would be bad.”

“You have no clue. Oh, a hover light! Useful!” Dina cried as she dove towards the floor, moving worryingly close to one of the corpses. “Close your eyes!”

I hesitated as Dina’s hand closed around the milky white ball before gently tossing it into the air. Lifting my gun, I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath, listening carefully for any hint that the corpses might be moving or something else might be preparing to attack.

Anxiety forced me to open my eyes again too soon, and I blinked in the dazzlingly bright light before looking around the illuminated room. A strange emotion came over me as I took in the room. Sadness. With the ball of light hanging in the air, the office looked more normal. I could almost imagine what it was like to work there back in the day.

It seemed fairly nice, despite the metal shutters covering the window. They blocked everything out, but there must have been a way to open them. Judging from where the window was, it probably looked out over the entire building. The person who owned the office could probably stand there and watch people going about their days, and that realisation made me strangely wistful, but I wasn’t sure why.

“This is great,” Dina muttered, and I tore my eyes away from the window, looking down at the table before me and scanning the items quickly.

“Yeah,” I agreed before noticing something at the corner of my vision.

I swallowed nervously, wishing that I could just ignore what I’d seen, but I couldn’t do it. Instead, I forced myself to look at the corpse on the ground again. I hadn’t been able to see it before; the angle was wrong, but from where I was standing, it was suddenly very clear that their skull was smashed.

Not just smashed. Shattered. Did it happen when they fell from the chair? No, that didn’t make sense. There were no skull fragments on the ground nearby. But then I couldn’t see any anywhere in the room. Either they’d crumbled due to age, or…

It must have happened before they died. They must have received some kind of head wound that destroyed their skull and killed them, but why? And who had done it? Was it the person in the chair? Or had someone stormed in and killed them both? A shot from behind might have caused the person on the ground to fall out of their chair.

“Do you see that?” Dina asked.

I glanced up at her, hoping she hadn’t seen the corpse’s skull. She was managing well, but the bodies had unnerved her, and something told me if she realised what had happened to the one in front of me, it would make things worse again.

“What?” I replied, following her gaze towards the desk. It took a second for the label to appear, but when it did, I felt a smile grow on my face. “A projector.”

“And a databank,” she said, her gaze hungry as she stepped towards them. “Apparently, it needs batteries, but… there! Do you see the filing cabinet?”

I looked at the metal cabinet, feeling grateful for the buffs as a small label appeared, informing me that there was a lock box containing batteries somewhere near the bottom.

“I see it,” I said, stepping forward and grabbing a few collectables from the table as I moved towards the metal cabinet. “I… think it needs a key?”

“What?” Dina groaned as I crouched before it. “I don’t see any keys. Maybe one of the corpses has it? I can’t see what loot they have.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the body on the ground, reluctance growing within me.

“I don’t want to search a corpse,” I muttered.

“Tough! I said I didn’t want to touch them, and you said it was fine, so you have to do it!” she said, a hint of fear entering her voice.

I let out a sigh.

“I’ll take one, you take the other?” I suggested hopefully, but I already knew she’d refuse.

“Clea!”

“Fine, fine,” I grumbled. “I’ll search them both, but you better be ready to shoot them if they move.”

“I will,” she said, tightening her grip on her gun.

I glanced up at her again as I turned towards the body, unsure of what to do. Normally, when we searched monsters for loot, we just had to touch them, and their inventories popped up, but I wasn’t sure if the corpses would be the same. They were humans. Or they looked like humans. Maybe that made them different somehow?

There was only one way to find out.

“Ready?” I muttered, my gaze skittering over the corpse as I watched for movement.

“Ready.”

I took a deep breath to steady myself, but it didn’t help. The idea of searching a dead person for loot felt so wrong, and I really didn’t want to do it, but I had to. We hadn’t found any lock picks in the office, and we couldn’t exactly leave to search for them. Still, my hand didn’t want to move. I had to force myself to reach out, trying to work out where the safest place to touch it was.

Luckily, there were a few scraps of fabric clinging to the body that had yet to crumble away. It wasn’t until my fingertips were mere millimetres away that a thought came to me. Did the clothing count as part of the corpse? Or would it be classed as a separate object, something that was covering it or blocking it?

It didn’t matter, though. My reluctance to touch the dried skin of the corpse forced me to gently touch the material. Bile burnt my throat at the sensation of the strangely solid flesh below, and I ripped my hand away, so glad that I was wearing gloves and hadn’t touched it with my bare hand. Something told me it would be impossible to ever get that feeling out of my mind.

“Are you okay?” Dina asked, her tone sympathetic, as I gagged again, trying my hardest not to throw up.

If I did, the arcade machine would clear it away, but people might see. I wasn’t sure what time it was or if people were still in school, but I didn’t want to risk it. It felt weak, and I hated that. I had to be strong so people could look up to me.

“Fine,” I gasped. “I got the inventory.”

It had appeared the moment I touched the corpse, but I had been so distracted by my disgust that I hadn’t even been able to look at it.

“Yes,” she hissed. “So? Is the key there?”

I allowed myself to shut my eyes for just a moment before opening them again and staring at the inventory that floated in front of me.

“No,” I said slowly, scanning the items and reading their descriptions. “There’s… the code for the office door, and it’s the same as the code for the databank according to this. Then… there’s another note, but apparently, it’s too crumpled and stained to read.”

That was all the description said, but it wasn’t quite true. A dark liquid, that I was pretty sure was blood, had spread across most of the paper, but a section at the bottom was untouched. It wasn’t easy to make out the words, but enough of the ink had survived for me to be able to read, ‘I’m sorry I had to do this, Am. I love you’.

Maybe it was foolish, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell Dina. She still looked too nervous, and I didn’t want to remind her that the corpses had once been alive. I wanted to protect her from it.

“Oh, weird. Anything else?” she asked.

I paused, eyeing the other two items.

“Yeah… there’s a gun and… an empty poison bottle.”

Dina’s eyes turned wide, and she took a step back, her torch swinging to point at the other body.

“Poison?” she repeated. “Did that person kill the other one?”

“I don’t know,” I said as I straightened up and started to move around the desk, eyeing the corpse as I did.

“Wait… are you sure we should be doing this?” Dina asked nervously.

I understood her hesitation, but I kept my expression blank as I met her gaze and shrugged.

“We’ve come this far,” was all I said.

Dina nodded as she began to edge around the table, staying a little distance away from the body.

“I guess.”

I didn’t give myself a chance to hesitate or worry too much that time. I just reached out as soon as I was close enough to touch the corpse, pressing my finger against the fragile fabric and biting the inside of my lip to keep my nausea at bay. Somehow, that worked. I was still disgusted, but I didn’t even gag as I pulled my hand away and stared at the items before me.

“Is that it?” I muttered without meaning to.

“What did they have?”

“A handgun and a tarnished badge,” I told her.

There was a moment of silence before Dina spoke again.

“A badge? Like an achievement?” she asked.

“No,” I responded with a shake of my head. “Like a… broach.”

“That’s so weird. What’s it look like?”

I stared at the silver item, trying to think of a way to describe it.

“I don’t know, but I think I kind of recognise it. It’s kind of in the shape of a crest, and there’s a bird on it… I don’t know which one, though. Oh, actually,” I said, realising I was being stupid. “Here, I’ve added it to my inventory. Have a look.”

Dina’s eye immediately began to glow blue, and I glanced at the corpse again before looking around the room. There had to be a key somewhere. Surely, it would be in one of the drawers or something. I gave the top one a tug, but it didn’t give.

“Huh, that’s weird. I don’t recognise the bird,” Dina muttered. “Maybe it’s extinct now.”

“Maybe,” I agreed. “So… what are we going to do about the filing cabinet?”

There was a pause before Dina let out a sigh and moved towards it.

“I’m not sure. I mean… the metal looks pretty old. We could maybe just rip it open?”